[brianlovin]

Hey, co-founder here. We've really been focused on threaded, public-by-default, search-indexed conversations. We've found this to be super helpful for large, async communities so far, and the search-indexing is really great for organic discovery and preventing too many duplicate questions that someone might ask in a synchronous chat app. But we also support private communities, private channels, direct messages, public community/user profiles, and more. We've seen these things be really useful for content and community discovery.

[DIVx0]

I have a project within my corp where we need to collaborate with other companies on a shared project. We want to do this privately and right now run our own rocketchat stuff to do this. However we are open to hosted solutions.

I was unaware of this product until now, I figured I'd give it a spin to see what was available now and hope for some cool github integration in the future.

However the public-by-default stuff is a bummer. I know there are ways to make things private and perhaps its just me not spending enough time with the product but even if I make a private community it always has a _public_ general thread that I can't delete.

The public general thread is the default for any new thread or conversation so I can see that it will be easy to unintentionally create a thread that was intended to be private as public.

I understand why you want public-by-default, to increase engagement and community building but there are many businesses using Github and could use this tool if they were sure that they could keep stuff buttoned down.

So perhaps you guys could add a "business" or "private first" context that could be used for folks like me to ensure that while operating in that context I am operating as private-by-default.

Also, can you give any hints to what integrations might come?

[brianlovin]

Hey there - if you selected 'private' during the community creation flow, everything in that community will be private. However, there will still exist the concept of "public" and "private" channels, however those scopes are still constrained by the community settings. For example, a private community with a public general channel means everyone who has access to the community can see those conversations. But if you have a private channel in a private community, only a subset of authorized community members will be able to see those threads.

[tracker1]

OT: My hope here, is that the integration with Github will also, as a side effect allow orgs using MS Teams to bridge the public channels... Letting an org use the more powerful MS Teams client internally, but still integrating with Spectrum without the need for yet another client for public interactions.

[blfr]

Like Google's Wave (RIP)?

[redindian75]

Forums?

[carwyn]

It's more real-time capable than classical forum software meaning you can use it as a channelized chat system.